Tag Archives: routing

None of us have 20:20 vision when it comes to reading gridded wind gribs. Some of us are better than others at trying to see through the myopic maze on SOL as we pull the time bar steadily from left to right, but honestly everybody does better when they get themselves a pair of glasses. Continue reading 'Confessions from the Canaries'→

The race was designated a ‘sprint’, but the winds were light and the water almost glassy — just like it was in this photo looking east toward mainland Chile across a cove on the island of Puerto Aguirre.
The light airs forecast in our WRF High Resolution GRIB made for a technical race that put a premium on keeping the boat moving while threading through a myriad of islas.
The length of the race favored skippers in the time zones of the Americas.Continue reading 'Puerto Aguirre – 2017'→

This is not really a report on my Geraldton-Cape Town race so much as some observations on SOL ocean racing which hopefully might lead to some conversations on the Solfans blog and Sol chat.

I have promised to do a Pilot Charts routing before each race to show what, according to the ‘most likely’ reading of the Pilot Charts for the location and time and year we are racing, would be the ‘most likely’ quickest course.

This is of course not likely to be the course any of us might actually sail because we’ll be racing in ‘real weather’, and not ‘most likely’. However, even from this second race where I have compared the Pilot Charts course with the actual, there are some interesting observations to make. Continue reading 'Ocean racing along the latitude parallels'→

With less than 24 hours to go, the wind at the start is forecast to be out of the NE and under 5kts. Total time for the race looks to be about a day and a half.The wind is forecast to clock 90° in the first six hours, giving racers a port tack start, and then a long reach up Long Island Sound on starboard.
Slipping through Plum Gut, the starboard tack continues until the clocking wind forces a tack toward the sea. By that time, TWS is just over 6kts.

You probably know a little about what routers do, but you’re not very familiar with how to operate one, or how to operate QtVLM in specific. I will explain the most important controls, and describe how you can do a basic routing. I assume you have already installed QtVLM.